Service not among the city’s goals

When they decided to destroy our old city hall one of the departments that had to move was the tax department.

The city decided to relocate them to a downtown bank building. After a while the employees complained about the parking situation and as we wrote in Another inconvenience the city required their landlord to provide parking for the city employees in the adjacent parking tower.

That resulted in the parking tower having less places for taxpaying citizens to use when they needed to go to the tax office.

Yikes!

I went downtown the other day and tried to park in the bank building’s parking tower. The sign at the entrance declared that there was only one rate to be applied whether you parked for a few minutes or all day. The rate? Twenty-five dollars!

The situation made me wonder how treating taxpayers this way could be consistent with the city’s published goals. Poor against the standard was one of several posts where we listed the city’s goals.

As it turns out the city does not have a stated goal to provide service to the citizens.

City management and reps have reserved parking. The only people they want to serve own buildings and businesses downtown and have their own reserved parking. So there is no problem.

Parking prices are not the only prices that have increased. Chihuahuas ticket prices and beer prices are also higher this year. A 20-oz premium beer is now $8.50. A domestic beer is $7.50.

Mountainstar said the team was their “gift” to the people of El Paso. Some gifts to El Paso apparently come with high price tags.

The bio of Tommy Gonzalez’s new chief performance officer on the city website says she is a “dedicated public servant and community volunteer”. That’s an interesting way to describe a person making nearly $200,000 a year. Her long, nauseating bio, which is nearly three times longer than Gonzalez’s bio, looks as though she is marketing herself for all that paid consulting she gets to do on the side.

What you’re experiencing is greed run amuck and people promoting their own agendas with total disregard for taxpayers and at taxpayer expense.

This is the way El Paso government works shake down the tax payers ever chance given. Brutus you are lucky they did not want to see what you had left in your pockets on leaving and demanding that too. ;0)

There is essentially no free parking anywhere for city “services” now. Parking near City One is all metered, and if you are attending an event that might last more than two hours, you have to sprint out to add money to the meter. I usually park up beyond I-10 and walk down. In the Good Old Days there were some parking places for the public in the lot by city hall. More than just a building was demolished by Queen Joyce.